Acid – Alkaline balancing

There are a lot of studies around these days about acid – alkaline balancing and how we ought to strive for a more alkaline ‘internal environment’. Our bodies strive to keep our PH (acid – alkaline level) at around 7.4 and this is as nature intended for us and is considered ‘neutral’. However as we go around our daily lives this PH balance can slide either toward the more ‘acidic’ (supposedly bad ) or to the more ‘alkaline’ (generally thought of as good). Think angry meat eater as opposed to serene vegan!!!

So what causes this fluctuation and does it matter?

– The food we eat can be either acidic: meat, dairy, wheat, processed food, pop etc or alkalising: vegetables, some fruit, some nuts and seeds, some fats, sprouts etc.

– The training difficulty can dramatically tip the balance towards acidity, as it happens most experts would argue that this has more of a acidic factor than what we eat.

– Stress also contribute to the equation tipping us towards the acidic (read blog ‘Stress it a bit of a drama’). Again most experts agree that stress is a major cause of illness (a modern day epidemic) and part of this is due to the acidic ‘inner terrain’ which stress promotes.

– I don’t want to freak anyone out but the thoughts we have also tip us one way or the other effecting the PH level, i.e positive / negative, angry / happy, stress filled / serene…etc.

There are many other things that affect the balance, emotional state, illness, injury, environmental toxins, electromagnetic exposure and so on.

So what? Does it matter?

Depending on the research you veer toward this is a difficult / contentious question but my understanding is that the more acidic we are the more susceptible we are to illness. People that eat a lot of meat and rely heavily on things like whey protein are thought to be acidic as well as people that train hard regularly. On the opposite end of the spectrum are tree hugger vegans that eat loads of vegetables and pulses and have pure angelic thoughts, they are thought to be alkaline and therefore apparently healthy!

The other issue with being in a permanent state of acidity is that it changes / clogs up the flow of nutrients to the cells and the collection of waste from the same cells. This is due, among other factors to the clumping together of the red blood cells which makes our blood flow sluggish. Some would say ‘ build your blood and a healthy body will follow’! This is a topic I shall write about to explain another time.

So what to do?

Should I stop training hard and live off green leaves in my monastery and have happy thought all day, without my phone / lat top / tv!? As we have discussed we should strive to maintain a PH of around 7.4 and what we do (actions, words, thoughts, enviroment) affects this balance along the way. We also know we are designed to eat both vegetables and meat and we know we are designed to be physical.

– So armed with this knowledge, my appraisal is to counter our acidic meat eating, hard training and manic lifestyles by eating loads of alkalizing vegetables, green vegetables especially as they contain chlorophyll which has a similar molecular structure to blood. Therefore improving blood health.